How do I ensure I am providing value to the organization?

Business value starts and ends with strategy. Whether your organization is considering investing in a new digital workplace, or you are planning on renovating your current solution. The most important question to ask is:How are you going to measure and maximize the business value to your organization?

Defining your business challenges

Most companies struggle with isolated knowledge workers and a limited understanding of organizational expertise. Corporate knowledge is trapped in the minds, memory, and messages of your workforce, and these barriers hamper productivity, decrease employee awareness, and cripple innovation. Digital workplace solutions are all about breaking down those barriers.

It's about using digital technologies to help create connections between the people, information, and processes your employees need in order to do their jobs more efficiently and effectively, and they make you more agile, productive, and competitive.

During the Prep Stage, take the time to define the business challenges and value to the organization. Ask yourself:

What are the key business challenges we are trying to solve?

Which challenges have the biggest impact to the business?

What audiences gain the most value, if solved?

Can the value be measured?

Aligning value with strategy and objectives

It’s important to note that there’s no one specific way to measure the impact of your digital workplace on your organization. Every company is different – in requirements, business objectives, culture, and way of doing business. While most executives can inherently understand the value of increased dialog, greater engagement, and better knowledge sharing in the workplace, it’s difficult to measure.

Before you can begin to think about how to measure the value, you need to clearly understand your business strategy. Context matters and alignment is critical. If intangible assets don't align with the strategy, then little value can be created. Take the time to understand the pillars that drive your business forward, and how the capabilities of your intranet support key business metrics.

When your digital workplace strategy is constructed with specific goals in mind, it has a much higher probability to have a positive impact on productivity, employee engagement, and innovation within your company.

Start by developing a strong understanding of your culture, strategy, and the workflows you’re trying to augment, and compare that with the cost to acquire the technology. As you define the relevant metrics and monitor progress against your goals, you’ll gather the insight required to keep evolving, and that’s the true measure of success.

There are two ways to measure the success of your digital workplace solution:

Measuring objectives and outcomes

A good place to start when building your digital workplace plan is to determine the key objectives and measurable outcomes. Here is an example of three business objectives and outcomes to get you started.

Objectives

Outcomes

Improve employee productivity across the organization

Drive corporate performance across the entire company – from your employees, teams, and executives

Drive innovation within specific team or business unit

Bring new ideas to life which accelerate your business – from process improvements to the introduction of new products and services